Wow. I have not written a blog post in almost two years. Sorry about that. Life has been very interesting. Hopefully, I'll get back into a rhythm soon. In the meantime, here's a post that I wrote last year but never got around to polishing up until today. Hope someone out there is still listening.
Pen or pencil? Spiral notebook or binder? Every writer has his or her own preferences. And these days, there's another choice writers need to make. Should we use Microsoft Word or one of the independent programs designed specifically for fiction writers?
My program of choice is Scrivener, and today I'm going to tell you why it should be yours too. Just so we're clear, the creators of Scrivener are not paying me to do this. I really love the program that much. Here are five reasons why it's the perfect tool for a busy writer.
1) You can keep everything in one place.
Microsoft Word has its uses, but it really wasn't designed for writing a novel. You can only open one document at a time. If you want to flip back to your research or your character sketches to make sure you don't give someone the wrong eye color, you'd have to open that in a different window. Not in Scrivener.
Scrivener doesn't save documents. It saves projects. There are three basic pieces of each project. There's the binder, the editor, and the inspector. The binder holds all the documents related to that project. Research, brainstorming, notes, manuscript, all in one place. To see any particular page, you just click on it in the binder and it will open in the editor. At the same time the inspector will display a notecard in which you can type a brief summary of that document. If you want to look at more than one page at the same time, you can split the editor in two either horizontally or vertically. The editor can also be converted into a corkboard where all your notecards are displayed side by side. This is a great way to plot your story.
2) You can write scenes instead of chapters.
In the binder, you can create folders and sub-folders. As many as you want. I like to make each chapter a folder, and then I put each scene in its own document. I usually don't write my stories in chronological order, so this allows me to keep the pieces together while I'm filling in the gaps. Unlike the Windows file explorer, which always stores documents in alphabetical order, Scrivener allows you to drag the pieces of your project to whichever spot in the folder makes the most sense to you. Great for us non-linear thinkers.
3) You can color code.
You can label each document with a color corresponding to any system you want. This color can represent whether the scene is a first draft or pretty much perfect already, it can represent which character's point of view the scene is told from, or anything else you need to know. This color will appear as a stripe across the document in the binder and/or a thumbtack in the notecard.
4) You can create hyperlinks between documents.
When I'm reading through my notes, I sometimes come across a name of a character or a place, and I can't remember for the life of me who or what that was supposed to be. Does that happen to you? Well, Scrivener can help you remember. When you're first typing up the notes, just highlight the name and create a Scrivener link to that character's profile or the chapter of the story where you mentioned that place. Then, you can just click on the name and there's everything you need to know. You can even set it to open the link in a second editor so you don't lose your place.5) You can make the document full screen.
Do you ever wish you could just make all those pesky buttons and drop down menus disappear so you can be alone with your story? Scrivener can do that. With a single click, the document becomes the entire screen, just you and your words. Need to switch back to editing mode? Just press escape.Those are just a few of the reasons that Scrivener is awesome. I could rhapsodize about it all day, but I'd rather go work on my novel. Just one more tip before I go.
The program looks dauntingly complicated at first. It has almost as many buttons as the cockpit of a jet plane. So if you're a first time scrivener, DO THE TUTORIAL. It takes about two hours, and it's dead boring, but you will get more out of the program if you actually know how to use it.
Happy scrivening! (Yes, of course that's a word. Don't give me that look.)
